Can Googlebot read the content on our homepage?
-
Just for fun I ran our homepage through this tool:
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml
This spider seems to detect little to no content on our homepage. Interior pages seem to be just fine. I think this tool is pretty old. Does anyone here have a take on whether or not it is reliable? Should I just ignore the fact that it can't seem to spider our home page?
Thanks!
-
Thanks all! Yes, I was familiar with the "Text-only" version and the Fetch as Googlebot, so I wasn't overly concerned. It just seemed odd that this particular spider couldn't get to the content. I think it is a very unsophisticated spider!
-
Assuming you've verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools, you can go in there and to go Crawl > Fetch as Googlebot. Put that page, and have Googlebot fetch it. Once it's done, you can click on the "Success" link, and this will show you exactly what Googlebot fetched with regards to that page. Make sure the source code you're seeing here is what you expect.
-
Hi Dana,
We would normally check through something like Website Auditor... I've run the tool on our home page and it seems to be missing some parts of our content, not sure why. Never had an issue before though with other tools, so would put it down to this tool....
Hope that helps.
-
Take a look at the text-only cached version of the page. If you are unsure how to do that follow my crude instructions below.
What I do to test if Googlebot can view the content of my homepage:
Do a Google search for 'site:example.com' and find your homepage. Next to the green URL in the SERP listing for your homepage there is a green arrow. Click that and select 'cached'. Then, when viewing the cached version of the homepage, click 'Text-only version' in the bottom right corner of the grey bar that appears at the top of the browser.
If the content you are questioning shows up, there is a good chance Google has obviously been able to crawl and index it. If the content is not there, there is a good chance they can't. If the content is in a hidden div it will likely still not show up in the text-only cache.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Our original content is being outranked on search engines by smaller sites republishing our content.
We a media site, www.hope1032.com.au that publishes daily content on the WordPress platform using the Yoast SEO plugin. We allow smaller media sites to republish some of our content with canonical field using our URL. We have discovered some of our content is now ranking below Or not visible on some search engines when searching for the article heading. Any thoughts as to why? Have we got an SEO proble? An interesting point is the small amount of content we have republished is not ranking against the original author on search engines.
Technical SEO | | Hope-Media0 -
Homepage is deindexed in Google
We recently noticed that our primary page was de-indexed in Google. When looking in google search console there are no manual actions taken. We did add a few new banners to the site but I have no idea why this would have negatively affected that site. I did add a new page called https://enleaf.com/company/testimonials/ that had some duplicate testimonials that were also on the home page but have since removed that. Not sure where to go from here.
Technical SEO | | AChronister0 -
Duplicate Content - Different URLs and Content on each
Seeing a lot of duplicate content instances of seemingly unrelated pages. For instance, http://www.rushimprint.com/custom-bluetooth-speakers.html?from=topnav3 is being tracked as a duplicate of http://www.rushimprint.com/custom-planners-diaries.html?resultsperpg=viewall. Does anyone else see this issue? Is there a solution anyone is aware of?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Index subpages but not homepage
Hello, Google index all my subpages, but not the homepage, how is this possible ? https://www.google.nl/#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.lavistarelatiegeschenken.nl He index the homepage of the neigbour country in the same language How possible ? Gr Marcel
Technical SEO | | Bossie720 -
Can Page Content & Description Have Same Content?
I'm studying my crawl report and there are several warnings regarding missing meta descriptions. My website is built in WordPress and part of the site is a blog. Several of these missing description warnings are regarding blog posts and I was wondering if I am able to copy the first few lines of content of each of the posts to put in the meta description, or would that be considered duplicate content? Also, there are a few warnings that relate to blog index pages, e.g. http://www.iainmoran.com/2013/02/ - I don't know if I can even add a description of these as I think they are dynamically created? While on the subject of duplicate content, if I had a sidebar with information on several of the pages (same info) while the content would be coming from a WP Widget, would this still be considered duplicate content and would Google penalise me for it? Would really appreciate some thoughts on this,please. Thanks, Iain.
Technical SEO | | iainmoran0 -
We have set up 301 redirects for pages from an old domain, but they aren't working and we are having duplicate content problems - Can you help?
We have several old domains. One is http://www.ccisound.com - Our "real" site is http://www.ccisolutions.com The 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain works. However, the 301-redirects for interior pages, like: http://www.ccisolund.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators do not work. This URL should redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators but as you can see it does not. Our IT director supplied me with this code from the HT Access file in hopes that someone can help point us in the right direction and suggest how we might fix the problem: RewriteCond%{HTTP_HOST} ccisound.com$ [NC] RewriteRule^(.*)$ http://www.ccisolutions.com/$1 [R=301,L] Any ideas on why the 301 redirect isn't happening? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Lots of duplicate content warnings
I have a site that says that I have 2,500 warnings. It is a real estate website and of course we use feeds. it says I have a lot of duplicate content. One thing is a page called "Request an appointment" and that is a url for each listing. Since there are 800 listings on my site. How could I solve this problem so that this doesn't show up as duplicate content since I use the same "Request an Appointment" verbeage on each of those? I guess my developer who used php to do it, created a dedicated url to each. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | SeaC0 -
Question about content on ecommerce pages.
Long time ago we hired a seo company to do seo in our website and one of the things they did is that they wrote long text on the category pages of our products. Example here: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/refurbished-printers/wide-format-laser-refurbished-printers Now my marketing person is saying that if its possible to put the text below the items, technically I will find out how to do it, but from your seo experience, is it good or bad? What about if we short those texts to one paragraph only? Thanks
Technical SEO | | levalencia10
